Carrier Assault is the contemporary “reimagining” of Battlefield 2142’s Titan mode we learned about last month. Now we know how it works. DICE say pining 2142 players will “feel right at home” with the mode’s array of optional objectives – despite the new setting.

“We hope you will get the same thrill out of parachute-spawning down to a carrier as you did when blasting off in a rocket pod towards a Titan,” said lead gameplay designer Gustav Halling.

This “homage” to 2142’s Titan mode relocates its map to the South Chinese Sea, and replaces hovering target monoliths with bobbing aircraft carriers. Players will want to infiltrate and destroy the enemy carrier before the same happens to their own.

DICE’s focus for the new mode has been in offering players “several options” to win a match – either through map control or direct assault of an enemy carrier.

“The differences in setting and time period do make Carrier Assault a fresh experience,” wrote Halling in a blog post. “Our goal has been to make Carrier Assault a really engaging game mode, and we truly believe the amount of variety present each round will assure this.

“You start out fighting a big-scale war with sea, land, and air vehicles controlling the map, and then everything evolves into an infantry-focused, close quarter fight inside both carriers at the same time!”

Every round is divided into two stages – map control, and carrier attack. First, players will race from their carriers to capture the missile control points dotted about the map. The more control points captured for your team, the faster the automatically-fired missiles will breach the hull of the enemy carrier – priming it for an infantry assault.

Once the hull of one or both carriers in breached, assaulting teams can either take a boat to the carrier and clamber aboard, or take advantage of the parachute spawn points above it. From there, they’ll need to destroy on-ship M-COM stations or wait for the hull’s health to hit 0% to win the match.

Carrier Assault will form the centrepiece of DICE’s Naval Strike DLC, released at the end of this month. Will you be buying into it?